[The song] “Catatonic Symphony” with its dreamy etherealism taking an angry launch into furious, stacked fire. “Grand Slam” starts by heaving with slow, majestic weight and heft, before the hammers get furiously hurled, “The New Sanity” is a tripping vortex of Bastardane through a kaleidoscope before it moves into the deep south and takes residence, while “Slow Decay” carries a sweaty, heaving riff train through some dank swamp waters. As for “Lose My Brain” oh how sweet a sub-Sabbath stomp it is, and “You Know That You Die” is this band’s autobiography, their seething, bristling, chopped and savagely fucked up twinkle-toed dance into scary places and spaces.

So yeah, pret-ty safe to say that they haven’t wilted, and they haven’t cleaned up. That’s not to say they don’t still have that glorious stench of ‘real band’- believe me, these young heathens still have a layer of travel grease slathered all over them, but they wear it with a greater sense of self than before. In their earlier days, you felt they were testing the limits and boundaries to see if there was any true access taking certain routes. Now you feel Bastardane know there’s no option but to let that filthy muse take them wherever they feel they have to go, regardless of any outside voices saying otherwise.

Then came the second ‘listen’ when I wasn’t even physically listening…

…that is to say, how it all sat when the music wasn’t playing, late at night in the small hours when things can get a little fuzzy anyway…

…this thing twisted my dreams and worm holed into my floating pre-REM space, with colors, pathways, narrow corridors, and wide stairwells that contracted and expanded as I ascended them. That fearlessness was even more pronounced, and parts and pieces screamed loudly at me (echoes though they were). I was fascinated to find myself in such a place seeing and feeling these things with no external sound and no bodily enhancements; that’s some powerful shit…think about how mighty that is; an album which coats the insides of your head and drip-feeds your brain when you’re drifting, long after the stereo’s stopped playing, the echoes and intentions of this work seeping into every crevice of semi-consciousness. 

So, when I say ‘this record’s a trip’ I’m not fucking around with phrases, I’m telling you what happened to me in the hours after that first late-night listen. Which now means that this new Bastardane album leaves me wanting to feel it’s unique and immersive viscera in different places during different experiences. What will happen when I check it out on a flight? How will it leave me feeling after listening on a hot summer’s day at the beach? Will it be OK to let it bleed loudly on a long drive down a freeway on one of those journeys which start at dawn and end a little before midnight, fueled by coffee and shitty truck stop ephedrine pills? This is a journey – a trip – you’ll end up taking repeatedly because no two spins can be the same. This isn’t a Phil Collins or U2 album that you can safely singalong to. If you had to tag it with musical siblings, try COC with some Discharge, Kyuss, Butthole Surfers and old old Black Sabbath sometimes refracted through the lens of Pink Floyd (in weight, not in style, because this thing sometimes gets airborne and floats for a while) …it’s all of these and maybe none of them.

Maybe I’m trying too hard to make it easy for you to understand the ride you’re about to go on when the truth is you should just go on the fucking ride and stop reading this right now….